Platform Lead - OpenShift

Job Overview

In this role, you will be responsible for guiding the technical vision of an enterprise OpenShift platform, remaining hands-on while contributing. This position involves both direct engineering work – architecture, troubleshooting, platform management, and automation – and leadership of a team of OpenShift administrators, setting operational standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the technical strategy for container infrastructure across multiple environments.
• Directly build, manage, and upgrade OpenShift clusters, actively working on system terminals rather than delegating approvals.
• Ensure platform stability through incident resolution, problem management, regularly scheduled patches, backups, and recovery drills.
• Decide architectural approaches regarding scalability, capacity planning, and performance issues.
• Drive comprehensive automation using declarative infrastructure, pipeline-based deployments, and Git as the definitive configuration source.
• Maintain security by managing access controls, certificate lifecycles, and proactively fixing vulnerabilities ahead of audits.
• Investigate root causes of major outages and implement thorough fixes instead of temporary solutions.
• Keep documentation, runbooks, and standards current and clear to facilitate team handover.
• Provide platform health and service level reporting tailored for non-technical stakeholders.
• Share on-call responsibilities and lead incident responses when necessary.

Team Leadership

• Manage daily operations for a group of platform administrators.
• Review and approve team designs and deployments prior to production release.
• Mentor engineers in technical skills beyond just development plans.
• Collaborate with application, infrastructure, network, security, and DevOps teams to onboard and maintain workloads.
• Coordinate priorities with architects, project managers, and broader business units.

Qualifications

• Approximately eight years of experience spanning infrastructure and platform engineering, including deep expertise in OpenShift and Kubernetes.
• Proven leadership experience, either formally or as a recognized technical authority among peers.
• Strong knowledge of underlying systems such as Linux, networking, storage, and container runtime technologies.
• Hands-on experience managing production environments at enterprise scale, including troubleshooting failures and learning from them.
• Proficiency in automation tools including Ansible, Terraform, Bash, and Python.
• Solid practical usage of pipeline and GitOps methodologies beyond mere proofs of concept.
• Experience with observability, logging, and performance tuning, understanding key metrics without direction.
• Capability in resilience planning covering availability goals, recovery objectives, and capacity forecasting.
• Degree in a relevant technical field or equivalent practical experience.

Additional Preferred Qualifications

• Certification in Red Hat OpenShift administration is advantageous.
• Familiarity with service mesh, operators, cluster management, security tools, and Argo CD.
• Experience managing platforms that support multiple business units instead of a single application.